The Girl Is Murder (15 page)

The cabbie drove like a madman, obviously eager to get us into Harlem and get himself on his way. I rolled down the window and concentrated on the view as the wind whipped my hair in my face. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see—crime out in the open, maybe—but Harlem looked pretty much like the rest of New York, save the skin color of most of the people living there. There were grocers and produce stands, children out playing in the dimming twilight, and couples walking hand in hand, dressed in their best getups, many of which mirrored our own attire. When we paused at a traffic light, I could hear music coming from somewhere nearby. I thought it was the radio, until I saw a man singing on a street bench, using the wooden seat as his stage. He saw me watching him and rewarded me with a smile before launching into another song and dance.

At last we came to a stop on Lenox Avenue. Brightly lit clubs lined the block, their names identified in brilliant neon that pulsed against the darkening sky. I paid the driver, adding a tip, and we all tumbled out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Suze took me by the arm and pulled me toward what looked like a large theater marquee. It read SAVOY and a huge crowd of people lingered beneath it, clearly waiting to get inside.

“What’s the holdup?” I asked.

“The band’s still frisking the whiskers,” said Maria. “Until they’re ready, we wait.” I stared at the building, trying to take it all in, an impossible feat given its size. It was a block long, stretching the distance between 140th and 141st streets. Music leaked out its windows and doors—brass instruments, drums, piano, and guitar, each sounding strangely tempered as though they were saving up their energy for the real thing.

At last the doors opened and the crowd streamed inside and up the stairs, our group among them. As I followed the flow, I saw both black and white faces itching to get on the dance floor. Many of the men were outfitted in the same strange suits Benny and Dino wore. The women, by and large, were stunning. All wore skirts like the one Suze had loaned me, reaching to the middle of their calves but capable of standing straight out at the waist. Many had flowers in their hair and heavily made-up faces that told of the hours of preparation they’d endured for this evening. The air was heavy with the scent of hairspray, perfume, cigarettes, and another smoke I couldn’t identify but which I found pleasantly sweet. As we at last arrived at the entrance to the ballroom itself, I could see signs reporting that the Savoy Sultans were one of two bands taking the stage that night.

“The joint is jumping. You ready to bust loose?” Suze asked me.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

The ballroom was gorgeous. The wooden floor gleamed with wax; the chandeliers twinkled in the dim light. Two bandstands populated the room, one of which was already taken up by a group playing a song I didn’t recognize. I had no idea how we were expected to dance in there. The place was wall-to-wall people, except for a small cordoned-off section where a few pairs of dancers performed such feats of gymnastics that I was terrified they were going to hit the vaulted ceiling.

“What’s that?” I asked Suze.

“Cat’s Corner. That’s where the best of the best strut their stuff.” We found a spot near the wall where we were less likely to be trampled, and I watched as these extraordinary dancers continued their demonstration. I’d heard about swing and certainly knew much of the music that fell under that label, but I’d never seen the dancing that accompanied it before. At least not like this. The men literally threw their partners around and the women let them, demonstrating such grace, trust, and athleticism that I wanted to weep for the sheer beauty of it all. How had they learned to do that? Weren’t they afraid their partners would drop them? Were they embarrassed when their skirts rose into the air, showing off their garter belts? Would they be mortified to learn that every time they flipped I could see the white flash of their panties?

But it wasn’t just the dancing that grabbed my gut and held me solid. The music was different. This wasn’t Benny Goodman rocking the airwaves from the parlor radio. These musicians worked their instruments like they were part of themselves—trumpets grown in place of arms, pianos where there should’ve been legs. Instruments didn’t sound like instruments here: they were animals that growled, hooted, and barked in four beats to a measure. I don’t know how the musicians got them to sound that way, but it was more alive than any music I’d heard before.

“What do you think?” Suze yelled above the roar of the band.

“It’s amazing!” I wished I had a chair I could sink into so I could take it all in. I felt like I’d woken up in a foreign land. All around me people talked about scobo queens, hepcats, high steppers, trucking, and tumbling. With each word I didn’t understand, I turned to Suze and asked for a translation. She patiently laid out the racket for me as best she could. “Can you dance like that?” I asked her.

“No way. Half of those hoofers are working on Broadway. You ready to get in there?”

I backed away from her, instantly afraid. “Not yet.”

“Relax, baby—just watch and learn. Nobody ever died from doing the jitterbug.”

Before I could respond, a man took hold of Suze’s arm and pulled her into the center of the dance floor. They joined the gyrating, swinging mass of humanity while I pressed myself against the wall. So this was what people did on Friday nights. They didn’t stay home reading Nancy Drew novels or biding their time learning the detective business. They lived.

I caught a glimpse of Maria in the arms of a black man whose smile was sixty watts, easy. She was one of the better dancers on the floor, so comfortable in her man’s arms that I had a hard time telling where he ended and she began.

“Having fun?” Rhona joined me, a silver flask in her hand. Perspiration had plastered her hair to her head.

“I’m swell. Just swell.” I’d forgotten my reason for being there. How convenient that it hadn’t forgotten me.

“Want a tipple?” She passed the flask my way. Desperate to make her stay by my side, I accepted her offer and took a swallow. The booze burned down my throat, and it took everything in me not to choke and cough it back up. Is that what alcohol was like? And people drank it by choice? “Where’s Suze?” she asked.

I struggled to keep myself from gagging. “Dancing. I saw Maria over that way. Is that her boyfriend?”

“If he isn’t yet, he will be.” She took a sip and screwed the cap back on the container.

“How come you stopped dancing?” I asked. Talking suddenly seemed easier.

“I needed a rest. How come you didn’t start?”

“I needed a lesson.”

She laughed at that. This was good. “You should get Benny or Dino to take you for a spin. They can cut a rug with the best of them.”

“Is Tommy a good dancer?” I asked. I was surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth. Apparently, whatever was in the flask had erased my ability to deliberate before talking.

“Fantastic. One of the best. He was in Cat’s Corner a time or two.”

“It’s a shame he’s not here tonight.”

She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t respond right away. I was being too obvious. She had to know I was up to something. “You think I don’t remember you, don’t you? Talking to Tommy in the hall, hanging on his every word like God himself was speaking.”

“It wasn’t like that, Rhona.”

“Tell me another one while that’s still warm. I got my boots on, girlie. I know what I saw.” She shrugged and unscrewed the flask for another drink. I decided to move away from her. If she didn’t like me—and it was clear she didn’t—I wasn’t going to prolong my misery by forcing her to talk to me.

“Wait,” she said. She put her hand on my arm to stop me. “I’m sorry. I’m being a beast, aren’t I?”

“You shred it, wheat,” I said.

She grinned at that. I was learning their world, bit by bit. “You just remind me of her.”

“Her who?

“Tommy’s Upper East Side bobby soxer.”

This was new. “He has a girlfriend uptown?”

“Had. You went to private school, right?” she asked. I nodded. “So did his latest obsession. He loves those girls in their prissy little uniforms who reek of old money. Tommy thinks he’s too good for public school girls. Fancies himself a real B.T.O.”

“Oh.” Was that why Tom had asked Pearl who it was who had gone to Chapin? “I didn’t realize he was seeing someone.”

“You and me both. I followed him one day. Saw her with my own eyes.”

No wonder she’d gotten a new man when Tom disappeared. She wasn’t being callous; she was simply doing as he’d done. “So maybe he’s been with her this whole time?” I said.

“Nope. She gave him the gate back in September, but he wouldn’t hear it. Kept showing up at the duchess’s school and her fancy apartment, hoping to win her back. It was pathetic.”

I couldn’t see it. But I also couldn’t see Rhona lying about it. Her story dripped with truth. And jealousy.

“He told you that?”

“Nope, but he told Benny, and that’s practically the same thing.”

“They could’ve gotten back together, though.”

“If they did, she’s doing a fine job covering it up. I saw her out with stars and stripes on her arm just last week.”

“I’m sorry, Rhona. She sounds awful.”

“She is. And check this for irony—her name is Grace. You expect more from a girl with a name like that, you know?”

A chill passed through me. “What’s her last name?”

She snapped her fingers as the name came back to her. “Dimwitted. What a name, right?”

It would’ve been, if she’d remembered it correctly. It was actually Dunwitty. Grace Dunwitty. My former best friend at the Chapin School.

CHAPTER

11

GRACE DUNWITTY WAS THE DEFINITION of sub-deb. The daughter of a doctor, she was the third person in her family to go to Chapin. I met her my first day there, when our big sisters for the day sat us down together at lunch and introduced us. She was a year older than me and I liked her immediately. She was everything I wanted to be: pretty, blond, outgoing. The only thing I didn’t envy about her was that, like her mother, she was an unapologetic snob.

She was the last person in the world that I would’ve paired with someone like Tom Barney. The boys Grace went with were students at our brother school, boys who came from wealthy families, spent summers at the club, and were shoo-ins for the Ivy League. She would’ve seen someone like Tom as cut-rate, not worth the energy it took to cross the street to avoid talking to him.

What had changed?

“I know Grace,” I told Rhona.

“For real?”

“Well, I used to know her. We went to the same school.” I shook my head, trying to think a clear thought despite the one-two punch of booze and music. “I can’t see her with Tom.”

“Neither could I, but I’ve seen enough with my own peepers to know it was true.”

“What did he see in her?”

She was drunk enough that my curiosity didn’t seem strange. Either that or she wanted someone to talk to about this.

“If I had to guess, I’d say a way out. To him a girl like Grace was a ticket out of the Lower East Side.”

It didn’t escape me that she was speaking in the past tense. She passed me the flask again. Before I could take a drink, a hand extended her way and she took it, allowing the man attached to the other end of it to pull her onto the dance floor.

More hits from the flask and I was ready to take on whatever the night offered me. That meant that when Benny approached and asked me if I wanted to learn to jitterbug, I told him yes without thinking about it.

The next ten minutes were a blur as he tried to show me the basic steps and I tried to follow them without running into anyone else on the dance floor. My self-consciousness was gone. It didn’t matter that I stumbled or that I was as graceful as Pinocchio taking his first wooden steps. The music and the mass of humanity around me embraced me and made me feel alive for the first time in months.

“Now you’re cooking,” said Benny as he swung me to the left. And—boy, howdy—I was, too. I never considered myself graceful or, for that matter, athletic, but the music and the booze gave me the courage to give it my all. The steps no longer felt frenetic and strange, but as natural as walking. I could guess what Benny would do next, and rather than waiting for him to lead me, I anticipated his moves and mirrored them. “You’ve done this before,” he said.

“Nope.”

“Well, you’re going at it like gangbusters.” For the first time I saw how beautiful he was. It was funny thinking of a boy like that, but there was no other way to describe him as he moved about the dance floor, his grin never leaving his face. “What are you thinking?”

“Honestly, I can’t believe I haven’t tripped and fallen.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re funny,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“So what do you think of the Savoy?”

“It’s the most amazing place I’ve ever been.”

“You’re not scared?”

“Why would I be?”

“Tough neighborhood. Tough crowd. This ain’t the kind of place a girl like you should be.” His voice was playful. Was he flirting with me? I’d barely heard him speak two words since we’d met, so I didn’t know how to gauge his sideways smile or the way he never pulled his eyes away from mine.

“Says who?”

“Me.”

“You don’t look so dangerous to me,” I said. Pearl had to be wrong about the Rainbows. This beautiful boy with the dark eyes and the full lips couldn’t be a thief.

As though he heard my thoughts, he said, “Looks can be deceiving.” And then he did something very strange—he kissed me.

It was my first kiss and I was completely unprepared for it. And yet despite the fact that I hadn’t had time to analyze what was about to happen, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. There I was at a Harlem dance club, a little drunk and a lot sweaty, kissing a beautiful Italian boy wearing a pinstriped suit.

He pulled away but didn’t release me. I fought an urge to ask him if I’d done all right.

I didn’t want our time at the Savoy to end, but eventually it did.